Sun Microsystems Inc is getting ready to release its HotSpot faster Java Virtual Machine technology at next month’s JavaOne event, and Java architect James Gosling gave a preview of what to expect at the Software Development Show yesterday in San Francisco. HotSpot VM: The Next Generation, as Gosling billed it, will include more sophisticated garbage collection, dramatically faster synchronization, and a behavior driven dynamic compiler, as well as lots of room for interesting work, he said. HotSpot was first talked about last year, at the time Sun acquired Longview Technology LLC’s Animorphic Systems unit, a seven person team of compiler developers based in Palo Alto (CI No 3,103). The garbage collector uses the relatively new train algorithm which enables it to release large areas of memory in one block, thus making the collection of garbage a less disruptive process. It runs with bounded collection times that means the system won’t ever pause longer the 3 milliseconds he said. Faster synchronization will mean that multi-threaded Java applications should run faster. Synchronisation has been one of the biggest Java performance bottlenecks, said Gosling. But, he said the biggest rocket-science comes with the behavior driven dynamic compiler, which performs optimistic optimizations that make a guess at what’s coming next. Gosling said he’d spent a lot of effort in the original design efforts for Java on making sure that it could be compiled into pretty tight machine code. He said that recent comparisions between Java Just-in- Time-compiled byte code and C++ was showing performance pretty much neck and neck. He predicted that dynamic language compilation techniques would dominate the next generation of Just-in-Time compilers from third parties, as well as from Sun. JavaOne takes place in San Francisco from March 24.
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